Re: Sustain revisited (long)

Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:38:09 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.music.dylan
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> > the belief he embraced had very strong formative verbal codes.
> > There was a whole vocabulary he had to embrace. A way of speaking, a
> > set of verbal formulas. "Saved by the Blood of the Lamb." These were
> > much more determinative than the musical codes. Dylan sings great
> > gospel music. But the musical demands intruded upon his artistry far
> > less than the verbal demands.
> >
>
> Stephen,
>
> Couldn't you say the same thing about Dylan's blues songs? The Blues also
has a
> normative vocabulary, although its musical code is much more determinative
than
> gospel's. And by and large, Dylan's blues lyrics conform fairly closely
to that
> code. But -- as with his gospel songs -- he does break out of the
normative box
> sometimes to create really arresting images, as in "Leopard-Skin Pillbox
Hat":
>
> You know it balances on your head
> Just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine --
> Your brand-new leopard-skin pillbox hat.
>
> Do you really think Dylan's gospel lyrics are more constrained than his
blues
> lyrics?
Well, BOTH genres have a much greater interest in how the text is performed
than in the text itself. In terms of pure lyric, there are about four and a
half blues songs in the world. In terms of pure music, there are about two.
Gospel music, since it's relying on a slightly larger archive of event and
expression (the Bible), and doesn't really have a musical formula (unless
you're playing with hymn meter) is actually a good deal more free in this
regard.
Part of the enjoyment we get from particular styles of music (and
literature, for that matter) is in interacting with the recurring cliches
and archetypes; in other styles, our enjoyment is predicated on either not
noticing them or understanding immediately how their use manages the text.
As Stephen Scobie pointed out earlier, when BD went through his "gone
country" phase, there was (usually) an ironic distance clearly evident in
the songs and/or the performances thereof. This is never evident in the
gospel material. Nor, we should note, does it ever seem evident in the
blues material. He sounds pretty earnest when he gets up on stage in
1961-1963 and tells whoppers about how he learned this song or how he came
to write that song. He sees himself in a line of traditional interpreters;
somewhere along the line, that stops. For all its sapiness, what BD was
doing on Nashville Skyline displays certain traits that we now associate
with postmodernity. Certainly the role he began to carve out for himself in
the late 1960's is one that he returned to ca. 1975-1976. Yet if you listen
to tapes of 1978, when we again get long raps about the genesis of songs,
that distance is not apparent. In fact, I don't think we ever see the
"ironic distance" aspect of Dylan make a return until ca. 1991. Here we get
the raps again, but they serve mainly to establish a distance between Dylan
the performer, drunk off his ass onstage, and Dylan the songwriter, who is
for all intents and purposes long since dead (even as far as the UTRS
material that was barely a year old at the time).
To a certain extent, we have to chalk this up to the material. IMO, certain
musical genres demand that the listener elide the identities of human and
songwriter and performer. Certainly gospel music requires this: what the
hell is the point of any of it if the text is nothing more than a product
for the market, something other than the personal testimonial it wants to
sound like? I think it's absurd to want Bob Dylan to have produced an
ironic distance in his gospel music; show me gospel music that has that
ironic distance between text and performer and I'll show you failed gospel
music. This is like asking for ironic distance in a Handel oratorio: it
does not produce postmodern art, it produces bad art.
all riled up and nowhere to go,
Dino